by Tammy Cohen
‘I wanted them to be aware, that’s all.’
‘Aware of what?’
‘Aware that not everyone believes Charlie killed herself.’
‘And you thought that might be reassuring to them?’
‘Not reassuring. But truthful.’
‘Hannah, you’re an intelligent woman. You have a loving family, a supportive husband, a good job. You have everything to get back to. But there is only so much we can do here. You have to start trying to help yourself. Focus on the issues that affect you and your life. On what led you here. This is about your life. Your family. Your future. Your choice.’
Only after I’ve left his office and am heading back to the day room does it occur to me that this sounds like a threat.
All day I am haunted by the knowledge that Danny has gone behind my back to tell Roberts he doesn’t want me home. At first I am only hurt, but later, upset turns to anger.
It’s Danny’s fault. All his fault.
If he’d just been more focused. More present. All those appointments he missed. All those scans. Happy to get the news second-hand. Another kind of husband would have been able to see I wasn’t myself. Even Marco, our downstairs neighbour, had an inkling. I saw it in the way he watched me. His voice when he asked, ‘Is everything OK?’
But Danny’s attention had been elsewhere.
On her.
Not on his wife and daughter.
And now he’s having private meetings with Roberts.
My anger is powerful, and I start to enjoy it. Such a welcome change from the guilt I’ve been drowning in. I’m angry with everyone. My mum for not being able to stop it all from happening, Roberts for thinking he knows me when he doesn’t know the first thing about me, Charlie for leaving me.
‘You have to let it go,’ Mum said when she visited yesterday. ‘This anger with Charlie. She was ill. Just like you were ill. That’s why you’re here. To get better.’
But that’s not why I’m angry. I’m angry because, despite what Roberts says, I still can’t make myself believe she killed herself.
You know, there was a time I couldn’t think even a day ahead. Not even an hour. The future was so terrifying I had to exist from moment to moment. But now I’m booking a summer holiday. That’s progress, right? That’s what Charlie told me the morning she died.
But by not believing she did it, I’ve set myself apart from everyone else. Once, that wouldn’t have bothered me. But now I know that being apart, out of sync, is dangerous. The gap between your own self and the prevailing wisdom is a hole which a person can fall into and drown in without even making a splash.
Later that afternoon Darren is monitoring the internet session around the oval table in the day room. Most days we have two half-hour supervised internet sessions, one in the morning and one at this time of day, right before dinner and Evening Group. We tease him a bit about his purple jumper. Normally, Darren is the most conservative dresser – all checked shirts under navy or brown V-necks and corduroy trousers. But since he got a new girlfriend he’s been dressing more daringly. Last week he sported a pair of black skinny jeans, which he wore with self-conscious stiffness. And now a purple jumper.
‘I just fancied a change, that’s all. It’s nothing to do with Jolene.’
He pronounces it Joe-lin, heavy on the first syllable. But there’s no disguising a name like that.
When the teasing dies down, I open up my laptop. There are internet sites that are discouraged in here. Facebook. Twitter. All the places that remind us of our other lives. The lives that drove us here. It’s a relief, really. I don’t want to know how smoothly the office is running without me, or how much fun my friends are having – all the parties and the holidays and the long Sunday pub lunches. I don’t want to see the pictures of their weddings and their cats.
And their babies.
I go on to Google and type in ‘William Kingsley’. There are over three million entries, including a chain of estate agents in Missouri (‘your home is where our heart is’) and a nineteenth-century politician. I am on page four when I become conscious of someone behind me. A waft of coconut shampoo. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle.
I click off Google and turn my head so quickly I get one of those screaming muscle pains that come out of nowhere.
‘What you doing?’
Stella is standing against the light so that her face is in darkness, and there’s a weird halo effect around her head.
‘Oh, nothing. Just killing time.’
I hold my head in both hands and gently move it from side to side, trying to uncrick my neck.
Stella pulls up a chair next to me and sits down. She is dressed down for her, in a black velvet top and black leggings. Darren looks over, blushes and looks away again.
Stella is such an enigma. So childlike sometimes, and other times seeming like she knows so much more than she’s saying. So full of secrets. She’s been in the clinic for five months already and still nobody is completely sure where she comes from, who she is. She has told me her stepfather was in the military and that he and her mother lived all over the world before ending up, finally, in Washington, where he now does something in intelligence. Stella went to boarding school in Devon and Northumberland and Sussex. There is family money. A wealthy grandfather on her mother’s side. And new half-siblings who have inherited her stepfather’s red hair. A pattern of alcoholism runs through the generations.
Stella rarely has visitors. Her mother pays the fees and calls on the clinic’s phone once a fortnight. I can always tell it’s her because Stella sits in virtual silence, holding the phone and rocking backwards and forwards. As she’s Dr Chakraborty’s patient, he sends a regular progress email to her mother detailing her treatment and how she’s responding to it.
‘Our optimum outcome would be for Stella to reach a state of self-acceptance,’ one of the emails read. Stella knows this because her mother quoted it back to her on the phone. We had a running joke about that for a while. ‘My optimum outcome from this boiling kettle would be a cup of tea.’
Though Stella’s family is rich, they stopped supporting her when they realized surgery had become an addiction rather than a one-off fix and when the surgeons in the States and the UK started refusing to treat her, so she’d go to Brazil or South Korea, not caring about the credentials of the doctors who sliced her open. When she was forty-nine thousand pounds in debt she had to have emergency surgery to remove a fat clot that had formed in her lung after a bungled liposuction procedure in Turkey, and when she came out of hospital she was jobless and homeless and broke enough to accept her parents’ ultimatum. They’d pay off her debts if she got treatment.
So here she is.
I know Stella makes some people uneasy. The way her wide blue eyes never seem to blink. The sharp points of her cheekbones. The exaggerated curves and plastic smoothness. The way you never seem to be able to grab a hold of who she is.
Danny can’t cope with her at all. ‘Don’t you find her freaky?’ he asked after the first time they met. He doesn’t see what I see. The child entombed inside the stretched skin like a sausage in its casing.
After dinner we are back in our safe circle in the front section of the day room while Dr Chakraborty chairs Evening Group. He always looks so hunched and apologetic when he chairs, as though he’s embarrassed to be here.
He’s not the only one.
I used to make presentations to my entire company. I’d accompany important authors on grand book tours around England, organize parties where I’d dress up in my fanciest clothes and spend the evening introducing people to each other and engaging total strangers in conversation.
And now I sit in a circle with hair that needs a wash and bitten nails and sweatpants that I wear day in, day out because – well, why not? – and I don’t recognize myself, I really don’t.
Dr Chakraborty has skin the colour of poured honey and brown eyes that are like small pools of sadness in his face. His luxuriant white hair m
akes his smooth face appear almost boyish. He has a way of looking at you that’s complicit, as if you’re both in the same rather surprising boat. Isn’t this a turn-up? his expression seems to say. You and me. Here. Who would have thought it?
Charlie told me he’s divorced and that that, too, came as a surprise to him. ‘His wife gave him no warning, apparently. He got home from work and she was gone.’ I didn’t ask her how she knew. She was just that kind of person. You wanted to tell her things.
He turns to me. ‘Hannah, we were talking last time about the background to your admission here.’
When he says ‘admission’, he really means ‘breakdown’, and I think I might love him for his delicacy and the way he dips his eyes momentarily, as if in deference to my feelings – as opposed to Roberts, whose glacial blue eyes are like scalpels cutting you open, laying bare the pulpy, beating mess of you.
Dr Chakraborty checks through his notes.
‘If you remember, you talked us through the miscarriage, the IVF, how it felt when, all around you, friends were getting pregnant, some seemingly by accident, and how every month when your period came it was like a bereavement.’
Everyone is looking at me, and I swallow, feeling like there is a golf ball stuck in my throat.
‘Can you bring us up to date now? Can we talk about’ – there’s a momentary pause as Dr Chakraborty glances again at the notepad that is open on his lap – ‘Steffie. Can you tell us something about Steffie?’
It’s a name I never say out loud. I even avoid sounding it out in my head, as if just the sound of those two syllables linked together has magical powers. So to hear it spoken twice in the same breath is like a physical shock. I’m aware of my heart pounding, a tinny taste in my mouth.
‘I don’t like to talk about her.’
When I speak, it’s as if my words are sandpapering my tongue.
Dr Chakraborty nods approvingly. ‘Of course. Why would you? And yet.’
And yet, here we are. And I am here to get better. Getting better means talking about it. And it starts with her.
Steffie.
Curls, fat like squid tentacles and blackly glossy. A bare brown knee poking through her jeans like a knuckle. A smile that wrapped itself around my neck and pulled itself tighter and tighter until I couldn’t breathe. Dark eyes that danced with the camera lens. It was only a photograph. It fell out from the pages of a novel Danny had been reading on the plane, and had stashed in the hidden inside pocket of the case he always takes to Edinburgh. I never touched that case. Except that Mum had to go away for work and the strap on her weekend bag was broken so she needed to borrow one, and I couldn’t be bothered to go up to the loft to find mine. The case was dark blue, made of some kind of shiny nylon stuff. I can still remember the sound of the zipper of the pocket opening, my curiosity about the novel, whether it was the same copy Megan gave me ages ago which I thought I’d lost. The white flash of the back of the photo as it fluttered to the carpet. Turning it over and seeing those black curls. That smile. And I knew.
‘Danny spends a lot of time in Edinburgh,’ I tell the Group. ‘We always knew that was part of the job. He used to hate it, and the night before he left he’d be in a foul temper because he didn’t want to go. Then, all of a sudden, everything went back to front. He was moody when he came home, but as it got nearer the time to go back to Scotland he perked right up. I knew something was going on. Then, when I found the photograph …’
I stop. Swallow. There is nothing more to add.
‘Men are pigs,’ says Judith, to no one in particular.
‘Hope you gave him a hard time,’ ventures Frannie.
‘At first, he claimed he hardly knew her. Then, after I went on and on, he admitted she freelanced at the same company. Dad’s company. And finally, at around four in the morning, he admitted they’d kissed on a night out. “But that was it.”’
Dr Chakraborty raises his liquid eyes to mine and sighs, and I wonder if he’s thinking of his wife and hope he isn’t feeling too shit. Then I wonder why I’m worrying about him when my own stomach is churning and I’ve an ache in my side just under my heart.
‘And what happened then, Hannah?’
I don’t want to tell him. I don’t want to think about it. Don’t want to remember how Danny had fallen asleep and I watched his face and he looked like someone I didn’t know. Or how I got up out of bed and dug the photograph out of my knicker drawer, where I’d hidden it to stop Danny ripping it up, as he was threatening to do. Then I fetched a red pen from the kitchen drawer and I scored it through those dancing eyes again and again until I’d almost gone through the paper. BITCH, I scrawled on the back.
‘Then things went back to normal.’
Except they weren’t normal. It was as though someone had taken our life before and rotated it a couple of degrees so that everything looked almost the same and yet nothing felt quite right.
‘What’s normal? Who decides?’ asks Odelle. And she glances behind her towards Drew’s ever-seeing camera, as if to make sure he got that.
‘I thought Steffie was gone.’ I almost choke on the word. ‘Danny said she had left the company. He even agreed to consider another round of IVF, which he’d always maintained he would never do, going private this time to avoid the waiting list.’
‘And then?’ prompts Dr Chakraborty.
‘And then,’ I say, nodding, as if he has made a statement, rather than asked a question.
We’d agreed to put the whole thing behind us. We’d been getting on better than we had done in a while. I had the passcode to his phone and his emails. Danny has a tendency to dominate a conversation, talking over you in his determination to get his point across. But now he was taking time to listen. Deliberately leaving spaces for me to say what I needed to say. We agreed not to mention the ‘B’ word for three months, and that proved liberating. Knowing we could chat freely without ending up in a loaded baby discussion changed our dynamic. One Saturday morning, we were in the car going somewhere. Tesco, probably. And I remember looking at Danny and thinking how different he seemed. Wondering if he had changed his hair or was wearing something different or had just got older without me noticing. But then I realized it was because he was laughing. I hadn’t seen him laugh for a long time.
‘And then, Hannah?’ Dr Chakraborty has fixed me with his sad ‘what can one do?’ expression, and Frannie smiles at me from the seat next to him, a nervous smile that darts off her face and is gone, as if something has frightened it away. And I know I must go there. Because I must get better. I must get home.
‘It was the weekend, and Danny was stressed because he’d lost something. A business card from a potential client, I think. I was helping him look for it. I was in our bedroom going through his jacket pockets. And I found this phone.’
A tiny, black plasticky thing. Pay as you go. And, me being so thick, it didn’t sink in at first. I turned it over in my hand, almost laughing. It was practically a museum piece. I turned it on, puzzled, but not worried. Went to contacts. Just one number.
Just one.
Standing there in our room, listening to Danny in the kitchen crashing around and complaining under his breath. ‘I know it was here. Why do you always have to move everything? Why can’t you leave things where they were?’ Kids’ voices from the garden. Marco must have had his nephews over again. A smell of charcoal burning. Barbecue season starting early. And me in the middle of our bedroom, staring at a number in a contacts folder on a crappy phone.
I knew then. But still I put myself through it, as if I deserved the pain. I pressed call. It rang three times. Her voice was husky, with a laugh bubbling under the surface.
‘Babe! What a lovely surprise! Don’t tell me you’ve nipped out for milk again. You must have the biggest fridge in the world.’
‘Babe?’ I say now to the Group. ‘What grown woman says that?’
I went into the kitchen with the black plastic mobile in my outstretched hand. ‘Did you find …?’ Dann
y’s voice tailed off as he saw what I was carrying.
Babe, I thought, looking at him.
Then came the terrible time. Tears and accusations and justifications and denials. Ultimatums followed by shameless begging. I wanted him out. No, I couldn’t live without him. I hated him. I loved him. I was crazy. Crazy. Crazy. And, all the time, Danny wavered between her and me. ‘You’re my rock,’ he told me. ‘But she’s my beating heart.’
‘She was his beating heart,’ I tell the Group. Nina, who has been sitting in silence up to now, lifts her head and Frannie gasps. Dr Chakraborty looks away, out of delicacy.
Finally, Danny decided. It was me he wanted. He would do anything to win me back. He gave me promises. IVF. Adoption. He offered to resign. He gave me every single email and internet password. Rang me five, seven, ten times a day.
I gave in. I loved him. Megan thought I was an idiot. But what did she know about love? He couldn’t resign, though, because we needed the money, especially now we were saving for more IVF. Also, I didn’t want Dad to know anything was wrong. But when Danny was away he called me in the mornings, afternoons, nights, and we had a rule: if I called him, he would always pick up, even in the middle of a meeting.
Rules. We thought we could govern jealousy and love with rules. And grief. Because Danny was grieving.
The loss of his ‘beating heart’.
We got back on track.
‘You must have pretty low self-esteem,’ says Judith.
I catch Stella’s eye and we exchange a smile. Low self-esteem. Isn’t that why we’re all here?
Once again, Danny and I reconstructed ‘normal’ out of the debris of our former life. And if it had a few holes in it where some tiny pieces had rolled away or crumbled to dust we just politely ignored them.
I went on holiday to Crete with my mum and my sister. I thought myself happy.
Then came the knock on the door.
‘Why a knock? Don’t you have a bell?’
The question comes from a young woman who has only been here since yesterday and whose name I keep forgetting. Caroline? Catherine? Caitlin? She has OCD, I’m guessing. It’s a safe bet in these parts.
